The Comeback of Rand Paul
Strategic Culture Foundation (RSS)

Asking basic questions about the $40 billion blank check to the Ukrainians is just one of several savvy moves by the Kentucky senator on the political rebound.

By Сurt MILLS

It’s been almost seven years since the dumbass livestream, a United States senator’s words, not mine.

“The third question, most popular question from Google is: ‘Is Rand Paul still running for president?’” Sen. Paul read out from the campaign trail. “And, I don’t know, I wouldn’t be doing this dumbass livestreaming if I weren’t. So, yes, I still am running for president—get over it.”

It wasn’t the official end of the Rand Paul for president endeavor, but it was for all intents and purposes the true coda. In the swirling months around the livestreaming remark, Senator Paul would be the subject of a debate-stage inquisition at the hands of Donald Trump: Why was he even there? Trump, the Rain Man of polls he is doing well in, argued Paul was really in 11th, not 10th place. I take the future president’s word for it.

Rand Paul 2016, despite the candidate being labeled by Time magazine as “The most interesting man in politics,” just did not go well. And so the players in Washington wrote him off as political roadkill.

But in the years since the last real presidential campaign—Trump thinks 2020 doesn’t count, and as America looks down the barrel of a rematch…apparently the country agrees with him—Senator Paul has quietly focused on his strengths. While his fellow Kentuckian, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, announced a visit to Ukraine this weekend, the Bluegrass State’s junior senator had the temerity to ask: “Wait, what are we doing again?”

As I currently flee eight dollar gas prices in Californian (“The Ocho,” as Golden Staters are calling it; the 2000s really are back), Sen. Paul drives to the heart of the matter.

“No matter how sympathetic the cause, my oath of office is to the national security of the United States of America,” Paul said, announcing a procedural trick to gum up the passage of a $40 billion aid package that no one has read. “We cannot save Ukraine by dooming the U.S. economy.”

Recalling now that I flew out of the Cincinnati airport, which is in Kentucky, last week, I think it’s a reasonable question to ask: What’s the (Good) Matter With Appalachia? “Mitch” notably excepted, the area represented by Paul and now potentially J.D. Vance could be the national cradle of rebellion, as the region historically has been—this time against another 21st-century lobotomy land of endless war.

But it’s not just resisting a boondoggle in Ukraine where Rand Paul has made his mark.

He’s emerged as the Senate’s Anthony Fauci heckler par excellence. A medical doctor (quietly, all the actual doctors in the Senate are Republican), Paul repeatedly defenestrated (so to speak!) the Bad Doctor throughout the pandemic. Meanwhile, Dr. Mehmet Oz out here in Pennsylvania pledges to lead the charge for us all to forget-about-Fauci come next year.

Attacking the Pentagon old guard and human history’s most empowered hypochondriac are perhaps easy targets, but wins are wins, and there is a stunning paucity of folks in D.C. actually doing it. It also jives better with Paul’s more successful “folk libertarianism” portfolio…better that than carping about the minimum wage in an era when We The People feel as oppressed by the corporate state as the actual one. At the height of 2020, it was more than reasonable to ask: Is there even a difference?

So, taking into consideration his legendary father Ron, I’m not clear on what Paul Family revival we’re on.

Like Axl Rose in the mid-2000s, this has a feel of a “Final Comeback,” one in which encores are assured. But writing this here in the historical cradle of American liberty, Philly, it no longer s...

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 Pentagon-Funded Think Tank Simulates War With China on NBC
Strategic Culture Foundation (RSS)

By Caitlin JOHNSTONE

NBC’s Meet the Press just aired an absolutely freakish segment in which the influential narrative management firm Center for a New American Security (CNAS) ran war games simulating a direct US hot war with China.

CNAS is funded by the Pentagon and by military-industrial complex corporations Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, as well as the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, which as Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp notes is the de facto Taiwanese embassy in the US.

The war game simulates a conflict over Taiwan which we are informed is set in the year 2027, in which China launches strikes on the US military in order to open the way to an invasion of the island. We are not told why there needs to be a specific year inserted into mainstream American consciousness about when we can expect such a conflict, but then we are also not told why NBC is platforming a war machine think tank’s simulation of a military conflict with China at all.

Go inside our exclusive war game with @CNASdc —

The year is 2027. The briefing: China is poised to attack Taiwan

Which side would prevail? Would China attack the U.S. mainland? Could nuclear war break out?

Watch the full episode on @PeacockTV and at https://t.co/CN76hzJHEj pic.twitter.com/XOjyry0QEY

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) May 15, 2022

It happens that the Center for a New American Security was the home of the man assigned by the Biden administration to lead the Pentagon task force responsible for re-evaluating the administration’s posture toward China. That man, Ely Ratner, is on record saying that the Trump administration was insufficiently hawkish toward China. Ratner is now the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs in the Biden administration.

It also happens that the Center for a New American Security has openly boasted about the great many of its other “experts and alumni” who have assumed senior leadership positions within the Biden administration.

It also happens that CNAS co-founder Michele Flournoy, who appeared in the Meet the Press war games segment and was at one time a heavy favorite to become Biden’s Pentagon chief, wrote a Foreign Affairs op-ed in 2020 arguing that the US needed to develop “the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines, and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours.”

It also happens that CNAS CEO Ri...

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 NATO’s War on Truth
Strategic Culture Foundation (RSS)

“I have a dream. I have a dream that freedom from NATO will ring from the Ural Mountains of Russia to the Bavarian Alps, from every hill and molehill of Ukraine and Poland,” Declan Hayes writes.

Lord Alfred Ponsonby‘s dictum that “When war is declared, truth is the first casualty”, remains as true today as it did when he wrote Falsehood in War-time, Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War, his 1928 classic. Although Snake Island, the Ghost of Kiev and a million other NATO lies over Ukraine could be wheeled out to show NATO is a serial liar, NATO has a much greater lie afoot.

That lie is that NATO is only at war with Russia (Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Palestine, Venezuela, Iran etc etc) and not also against all of us. Although Ireland has not yet joined NATO, we too must freeze in the dark, join Nazi mobs vandalizing Russian Embassies, throw our houses open to the unvaccinated wives, mistresses and pet dogs of Azov Nazis and sacrifice our own futures, just to spite “Putin” (and Assad and all of NATO’s many other scapegoats). A surprisingly large number of simpletons, goaded on by NATO’s media, buy into that poppycock.

Jesus Was a Refugee

This trope is used by Ireland’s vast NGO complex as an excuse to ferry bus loads of vulnerable Ukrainian children from Ukraine to Ireland where the Irish tax payer is forced to pay for their upkeep, along with whomsoever else rocks up from wherever else. As ISIS operatives have recently gone on the offensive, beheading Irish men and raping Irish women, one would imagine some vetting would be in order. But none exists.

The Open Borders virtue signallers, who litter the pavements with their LGBT wreaths after each of those tragedies, mask a much bigger NATO crisis. Europe, of which Vichy Ireland is an almost inconsequential part, comprises less than 10% of the world’s population. Europe has the world’s highest median age (43) and the world’s lowest fertility rate (1.6). North America (the USA and its Canadian spare rib) comprises only 4.7% of the world’s population and its vital statistics are equally dire. Africa, by contrast, has 17.2% of the world’s population, a median age of 20 and a fertility rate of 4.4.

Compare and contrast any number of these countries. Let’s take the United States and Ethiopia. The Great Satan (Ethiopian figures in parentheses) is 83% (21%) urbanized, has a median age of 38 (19), a fertility rate of 1.8 (4.3), and a net migration of 954,806 (30,000, due to NATO’s wars in Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan). The demographic imperative suggests that, unless NATO’s leaders can radically cull Africa’s numbers or harness these changes, they must yield the field to Indian, African and Chinese numbers they cannot possibly hope to control.

NATO have been long aware of this challenge. The Population Bomb, a 1958 best seller written by two of their resident racists and available for free download here, predicted all sorts of plagues, pestilences and droughts...

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Blinken Plays With Fire With Morocco and Algeria. Can Trump Stop This Crazy Arms Race and Prelude to War Though?
Strategic Culture Foundation (RSS)

The more the West pours money into the Ukraine, the more the UN and its member states have to bang on this drum which is really the worst setback Morocco could imagine over the incendiary subject of Western Sahara.

Lavrov’s visit to Algiers to shore up support for Ukraine war has shown how ineffective and dangerous Blinken’s moves are in the region. Some might argue he is making an already dangerous situation between Morocco and Algeria worse.

Is the Biden administration looking to start a war between Algeria and Morocco? At first glance, this may seem a little far-fetched as a scenario but it’s a valid enough question when you study the movements and statements of its diplo supremo Anthony Blinken. Just recently, the secretary of state jetted into Morocco for a few hours to pay his respects to the kingdom’s dapper foreign minister, before swiftly leaving to visit Algeria, Morocco’s arch enemy based on the latter’s support for the Polisario movement in the disputed Western Sahara. Leading up to the final days of Trump’s period in the White House, the former president signed a decree officially acknowledging (by America) Morocco’s claim that the disputed territory is a legitimate sovereign part of the kingdom. Until that point, relations between Algeria and Morocco were icy, but cooperative.

Biden has always opposed this move by Trump but is limited in what he can do to turn it around. On the one hand, Morocco has always traditionally had good relations with Washington and he doesn’t want to be the first president to jeopardise that; on the other though, his own political views are at odds with the idea of a country colonising another one regardless of the circumstances and is aligned to what many in the United Nations would prefer: some sort of democratic diligence to decide the outcome, probably a referendum.

In the summer of 2021, eight months after Biden took office, the Algerians decided that the situation needed a radical rethink, confident that a dithering Biden wasn’t going to overturn the Trump decision, neither on paper nor in gesture. The Algerians cut off one of its two gas pipelines which crossed Morocco territory before it reaches Spain causing mayhem as this pipeline effectively allowed Madrid to sell on to Morocco natural gas.

Six months later, the worst possible thing for Rabat, which was hoping to exploit the Trump decision, happened. The Ukraine war began, which for Morocco, was not good news as, quite apart from wheat imports being affected, it shifted backwards a more modern idea beginning to emerge that the Rabat elite had about occupied countries around the world. The Moroccan upper classes were beginning to think that the world was getting used to them – East Timor, Taiwan, West Bank and Gaza, Kashmir, Transnistria, Northern Cyprus – and that with the help of the U.S., the Western Sahara would slowly but surely metamorphosise into Moroccan Sahara. Perhaps it would take a generation. But it was a wait worth waiting for, the mindset in Rabat believed. Occupations hadn’t become cool as such; more that people are becoming dumber, media sloppier and the UN sensationally ineffective – an organisation most associate with sex scandals and corruption rather than being an international arbiter of disputes which it once was during the reign of Morocco’s Hassan II (who made the decision to incorporate Western Sahara into Morocco proper in 1975 when it was abandoned by its former colonial power Spain).

But the Ukraine invasion by Russia h...

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